The Virgin Suicides Wiki
"The Trees, like Lungs, filling with Air, my Sister, the Mean one, pulling my Hair..." -''The Virgin Suicides'' (1993) 'The Virgin Suicides' "The Virgin Suicides " is a highly praised 1993 debut novel by American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. The story, which is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan suburbia in the mid-1970s, centers around the bizzare and haunting suicides of five beautiful American teenage sisters known as the Lisbons. Their legendary suicides fascinate their community as their neighbors struggle to find an explanation for their shocking acts and what was lost and why. Twenty years later, the now five long dead sister's tragic story remains unsolved but their enigmatic personalities are still engraved in the minds and hearts of the neighborhood boys who secretly loved them. Now full grown men who have vowed to tell the girl's story, desperately retrace their steps in an obsessive investigation and attempt to analyse the several mysterious events that lead the girl's to their sad fates over two decades ago. In 1999 the novel was made into a successful and critically acclaimed debut film by director Sofia Coppola, starring actress Kirsten Dunst as the most rebellious sister and focal point character, Lux Lisbon and actor Josh Hartnett as Lux's love interest, Trip Fontaine. The Five Glittering Lisbon Daughters... "''The two Lisbon parents, leached of color, like photographic negatives. Then, the five glittering Lisbon daughters, in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, their skin, bursting with their fructifying flesh..." ''-The Virgin Suicides (1993) Michigan, Circa 1975... In a decaying suburb filled with dying fish flies and dying elm trees on the outskirts of Detroit, the Lisbons are a family of seven with a strong Catholic faith. Mr. Lisbon is a geeky math teacher who teaches at a nearby private and posh school and Mrs. Lisbon is a very strict, religious and square homemaker. The parents have five daughters: 13-year-old Cecilia, the dreamer, 14-year-old Lux, the rebel, 15-year-old Bonnie, the saint, 16-year-old Mary the girly girl, and 17-year-old Therese, the scholar. The mystique of the Lisbon girls is told from the perspective of the neighborhood boys who live on the same block as the Lisbons and attend the same school with the sisters. As the narrators of the novel, the boys describe the girls as all incredibly beautiful, short in height and having long blonde hair, and being round buttocks in demin. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them. ''-The Virgin Suicides'' (1993) The Lisbons lives change dramatically within one summer when Cecilia, a girl described as a "kook" and a "misfit", who bites her nails while obsessively wearing an ill fitting 1920's vintage wedding dress, attempts suicide by cutting her wrists open in the bathtub with her father's shaving razor. She is found in time by a boy named Paul Baldino and she is rushed to the hospital and survives the attempt. After visiting Cecilia's therapist, the Lisbon parents are advised to let their daughters have more freedom outside the confinement of their home, and more interaction with males their own age, believing this will be healthier for the girls who are somewhat kept on a tight leash. A few weeks later, a chaperoned basement party is thrown and the Lisbons invite the local neighborhood boys over. When the boys arrive they finally can see the authenticity of each girl, but the boys confess it is Lux Lisbon who is undeniably the most beautiful and ideal sister out of the Lisbon girls. Shortly after the arrival of "Joe the Retard" (a boy diagnosed with Down Syndrome) Cecilia asks her mother to be excused from the party and walks upstairs. Several minutes later the party hears a sound of wind followed by a moist thud. Mrs. Lisbon screams. Mr. Lisbon runs upstairs to find that Cecilia has jumped from her bedroom window and impaled herself on the sharp spikes of the fence below. The boys run to the lawn just in time to see the dead girl in her fluttering wedding dress in the wind, balanced cleanly on the spike with her eyes open, as Mr. Lisbon tries gently and unsuccessfully to lift her off. The cause of Cecilia's suicide and its after-effects on the Lisbon family are popular subject of neighborhood gossip. Shorty after Cecilia's wake, the boys get ahold of her Diary, which they discover is filled with short poems and random entries. The boys also find it interesting that Cecilia refers to her and her sisters as one entity, thus concluding that Cecilia was a "dreamer" who was completely out of touch with reality. Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly -''The Virgin Suicides'' (1993) Cecilia's death only makes the boys more curious about her life and those of her sisters. Unable to truly fathom them, the local boys begin to heavily day dream and fantasize about the Lisbon sisters in luminous and gauzy settings wondering how the girls truly feel and what they think. The Lisbon girls run wildly and freely in the boys imaginations like fleeting visions, unfathomable, unattainable and unforgettable. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them. ''-The Virgins Suicides'' (1993) When summer is over school begins, and the four remaining Lisbon girls attend class with their peers as if nothing ever happened. Over the next few weeks, the girls keep to themselves. The few friends that the girls do have at school, become uncomfortable because of the tragedy, and give them space. Even though the Lisbons do not allow their daughters to date, Lux Lisbon secretly begins a hot and heavy romance with local heartthrob and teen womanizer Trip Fontaine. When Trip first met Lux he declared it was love at first sight, a feeling from which he will never recover. He wanders the halls dreaming of her, but has no idea how to pursue her, having always been the one pursued. He gets his chance at a school assembly. Sitting beside her, he whispers that he will come watch television at her house on Sunday, and then ask her father if he can take her out. After an uncomfortable visit, Trip negotiates with the overprotective Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon to take Lux to a Homecoming dance, on the condition that he finds dates for the other three girls. Successfully providing three other dates, the boys drive together up to the Lisbon house. Lux, waiting on the porch, rings her doorbell to warn the other girls, and then rushes inside. As the boys enter the house, the girls appear in shapeless homemade dresses, with their hair overly teased. Once they are in the car on the way to the dance, the girls begin to talk and gossip. The boys realize that the Lisbon sisters are actually perfectly normal. At the dance, the girls make seven trips to the bathroom, but otherwise dance, talk, and flirt with the adoring boys. Trip and Lux, followed by Joe and Bonnie, sneak under the bleachers to drink peach schnapps and make out, before emerging again to dance. Everyone applauds when Trip and Lux are voted Homecoming King and Queen. Mary tells one boy that she is having the best time of her life. After the dance, Trip and Lux are nowhere to be found. The other three couples wait until 10:50 P.M. before driving home. Lux does not arrive home until well after midnight. Years later, Trip will explain to the boys that he persuaded Lux to sneak out of the dance and out onto the football field, where they made love on the goal line. Then Trip abandoned her to walk home. Despite Trip's feelings for Lux, he will explain to the boys that at that particular moment he just got sick of her. At 1:30 A.M. on Homecoming night, the boys, still heady from their date, decide to drive past the Lisbon house once more. They see a single light in the bedroom window. A shade is pulled back, and then the light goes out. The boys realize, deep down, that something has just gone very wrong. Consequently as punishment, the Lisbons become recluses as Mrs. Lisbon pulls all her daughters out of school, believing that it would help the girls recover from Cecilia's death. The following Sunday, after church, Mrs. Lisbon forces Lux to destroy her rock records. Besides family trips to church, and Mr. Lisbon's trips to school, no one is ever seen leaving the house. As the weather turns cold, the boys begin to notice Lux on the roof of the Lisbon house copulating with random men. No one knows how Lux meets these men, or how she manages to sneak them up onto the roof at night without her parents' knowledge. Some of these men tell the boys stories of being led through a dark house full of rotting and congealed food and empty cans, indicating that Mrs. Lisbon has stopped cooking and cleaning entirely. The men all speak of Lux's incredible presence, likening her to an angel. Yet they report that she often seemed bored by the sex itself, and speculate her ultimate motive. The boys, who are virgins, watch incredulously with binoculars, haunted by the fantastic image of Lux in the act of love. A few months after Lux is sent to the hospital because of a pregnancy scare (which her parents were told was simply indigestion) Eventually Mr. Lisbon is fired from his teaching job. And a very strange rotting smell coming from the Lisbon house permeates the entire block on the neighborhood. From a safe distance, all the people in the neighborhood watch the Lisbons' lives deteriorate, but no one can summon up the courage to help or intervene. Months pass by, and the Lisbons sink futher and further into a virtual state of limbo and isolation, yet they become increasingly fascinating to the neighborhood in general as everyone notices that the girls have turned Cecilia's second story bedroom window into a holy shrine. The boys eventually make contact with the Lisbon girls and decided to call them to communicate by playing records over the telephone for the girls, unable to find the right words to express their feelings, they say it through music. Though the boys have intended to remain true to the Lisbon girls, they are troubled that their memories and experiences of the sisters are slipping away as the spring progresses. A year after Cecilia's death, the boys still do not know why she committed suicide, nor the sisters' true feelings about the suicide. Finally, the girls send a message to the boys one night to come to the their house. Shortly after the boys arrive they meet Lux who is all alone, and calmly smoking a cigarette. She tells the boys to wait quietly inside for her sisters to come while she leaves the house to go into the garage to "start the car", leaving the boys to believe they will flee the country with the girls and elope. But the boy's fantasies are shattered when they witness three of the Lisbon sisters kill themselves: Bonnie hangs herself, Therese overdoses on sleeping pills, Mary put her head in the gas oven and Lux dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. The boys dont understand why the girls would have them participate in their suicides. The Lisbon girls could easily have killed themselves without inviting the boys to witness. The girls' invitation to the boys seems to be a cruel joke, designed only to confront the boys with their own inadequacy and ignorance. Yet the novel as a whole, and the girls' careful preparations, suggest a motive more profound than shallow cruelty. Instead, it was a test. Had the boys not come, the boys could have spent the subsequent years telling themselves "I could have saved her if I'd been there." But the boys were there, sitting in the living room, too caught up in their own fantasies to notice that the girls were killing themselves in the surrounding darkness. The boys not picking up on the fact that the Lisbon girls were killing themselves only intensifies the horrors that the girls were actually experiencing alone. Thus, by letting the boys fail to stop their suicides, the girls assert their independence, but also suggest the countless times in which the boys have failed them before, and will continue to fail them after death. Mary survives her suicide attempt and continues to live for another month spending her time sleeping and obsessively showering before successfully ending her life by taking sleeping pills like Therese on the same day as another girl's Debutante party. Newspaper writer Linda Perl notes that the suicides come a year after Cecilia's first attempt. And describes the Lisbon sisters as creatures so shut off from life that death was hardly a change. After the suicide "free-for-all," a devastated Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon sell the house and give up any attempt to lead a normal life as they flee the neighborhood, never to return. The house is sold to a young couple from the Boston area and most of the Lisbons' personal belongings are either thrown out or sold in a garage sale. The narrators scavenge through the trash to collect much of the "evidence" they mention, collecting whatever they could find and save these items like valuable souvenirs. They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws. -''The Virgin Suicides'' Twenty years later the boys are still obsessed with the girls who they feel were selfish for killing themselves. But they claim to be secretly still in love with all of them despite being middle aged men and having families of their own now. The story ends with the men concluding that they will never be able to put the peices of the five legendary suicides back together and find a satisfying answer to end the mystery surrounding the girls and their tragic actions. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together. -''The Virgin Suicides'' (1993) Suicides of the Lisbon Girls... Cecilia Lisbon Cecilia is the first sister to die. She attempts Suicide by slitting her wrist in the bathtub but is unsuccessful. A few weeks later she succeeds to commit Suicide by jumping out her second story bedroom window and lands on the iron fence below. She is stabbed by one of the sharp spikes that goes straight through her heart. It is Cecilia's Suicide that begins the domino effect of the Lisbon tragedies. "Mr. Lisbon was trying to lift her left breast, traveled through her inexplicable heart, separated two vertebrae without shattering either, and ripping the dress and finding the air again" (Eugenides 37). "She had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world." (Eugenides 38). Luxie Lisbon Lux commits Suicide by shutting herself up in the garage with the family station wagon on and dies by poison carbon monoxide. Before Lux went to the garage to seal her fate, she was the sister who stalled the boys so her sisters would not be disturbed while they killed themselves in peace. "They found her in the front seat, grey faced and serene, holding a cigarette lighter that had burned its coils into her palm" (Eugenides 281). Bonnie Lisbon In the basement, the group of neighborhood boys find Bonnie. At first they see a pair of legs swinging from the rafters to look up and see that the dead girl, dressed in a clean pink dress and compared to looking like a festive pinata, has hanged herself with a rope. "Above him, in a pink dress, Bonnie looked clean and festive, like a pinata" (Eugenides 280)." Mary Lisbon Mary commits suicide by putting her head in the kitchen oven with the gas on right when she hears Bonnie hang herself. "They found Mary in the kitchen, not dead but nearly so, her head and torso thrust into the oven as though she was scrubbing it" (Eugenides 284). Mary's first attempt at death fails but she gets it right on her second try by overdosing on sleeping pills like her older sister Therese roughly a month later. She is found wearing a black dress and veil with her makeup smeared. "The last Lisbon daughter, Mary, in a sleeping bag, and full of sleeping pills" (Eugenides 309). Therese Lisbon Therese's method of choice was overdosing on sleeping pills and gin up in one of the girl's shared bedrooms. The sleeping pills were probably stolen from her mother, who Lux mentions is an insomniac. Interestingly, a few days before her Suicide, Therese had strangely written a letter to the College University she wanted to attend. "Another reporter ended his broadcast by reading a letter Therese had written to the Brown's admissions officer only three days before she put an end to any dreams of college...or of anything else" (Eugenides 291). Latest activity Category:Browse